Often overlooked and underappreciated people working in the localization biz make games playable to native English speakers. I've often seen them get flak for JP to ENG translations not being literal enough and that's not fair. Translators have to take liberties to translate things that wouldn't have meaning otherwise in English and people wouldn't be able to follow along.

Anyway Alexander O. Smith is my favorite guy doing the work and two games that stand out that he worked on are Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XI.

VS has a fantastic translation that's entirely in medieval English while FFXI is pretty fun and lighthearted.

  • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    5 days ago

    Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Planescape Torment. Back in the days when publishers actually feared piracy and had to sell physical copies the Polish localisations were sometimes quite impressive (even more impressive because Polish movie dubbings are notorious for being fucking bad).

    Now when there is basically no Polish publisher and everything is just digital there's hardly even any Polish localisations (at least in the games i'm interested in) and the ones that do exist are solely bad to averagely translated texts and no voices.

  • Starlet [she/her, it/its]
    ·
    5 days ago

    The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is set mostly in late-Victorian-era-London, and the English localization really nailed the dialogue style they were going for. There's an interesting article about it here: https://www.ace-attorney.com/great1-2/us/blog/blog2.html

    It does a really good job at incorporating dialects that couldn't have been represented in any other language, too

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      • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]
        ·
        5 days ago

        It's one of the best translations I have ever played. It goes for a translation that matches Earthbounds tone. It's so well done I forgot I was playing a fan translation because it feels like an official release.

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        Here's the official site https://mother3.fobby.net/blog/

    • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      5 days ago

      So good.

      Get out of here Stalker!

      Hello, hello [meanwhile outside the science compound there's a gunfight between 500 zombies]

      You can't go there!

      STALKERS join duty and protect the planet from the zone!